Apttus is a Configure, Price, Quote platform built natively on the Force.com platform.https://dudodiprj2sv7.cloudfront.net/product-logos/8b/LR/L8OQLPVX3QFO.PNGApttusApttus - Comprehensive Business Automation Solution2015-11-13T17:35:03.995ZWe recently signed a contract with Apttus to leverage their Contract Lifecycle Management application to better automate the way we generate, approve, deliver and track our contracts within our Salesforce.com environment. The Apttus team got to know our business and understand our challenges and became a trusted partner to our business. Their solution will help us eliminate many of the manual steps required to process our contracts; reduce the number of manual quality checks; enable us to better search and track contracts by specific terms and ultimately increase the speed at which we are able to push our contracts through our process.,Understand business challenges.
Provide a full suite of solutions for a wide range of business challenges.
Provide executive sponsorship to eliminate obstacles to success.,Ease of Implementation.,9,Improved process speed.
Increased contract quality.
Ability to search contracts by term or clause.,Template Generators,20,2,Procurement Contract Management
Eventually, Quoting
Eventually, Customer Contract Management,Ensure accurate pricing
Avoid rogue discounting
Properly configure solutions,MAX - automated attendant,9,No,Prior Experience with the Product
Vendor Reputation
Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor,I'd interview more reference customers about the implementation experience as it was difficult at first, but eventually resolved itself smoothly with satisfactory results.Greg McLaughlinDon't Buy Apttus, The ROI is negative.2018-08-24T16:43:42.403ZApttus was brought in to use globally for all of Sales in generating quotes and contracts (the two are different in this case) to be sent and signed by customers. It is being used across Sales globally. The business problem it was supposed to address is to help our sales teams produce quotes faster, in the correct format, and be able to send them on the fly through Apttus/Salesforce to the customer to be reviewed.,The perceived power strength is that it is supposed to contain CPQ, Contract Management, Document generation and template manipulation, and cash/invoice process all in one wrapped package.
It was developed on the Force.com platform.
They provide multiple releases of their product per year.,The configuration of this product in terms of setting it up for users, requires a developer. The sales process tells you that it is built on the Force.com platform and an admin can configure it, however, this is not true. It required Visual Force and APEX configuration to make it work for the users.
Upgrading to the next version of the product also requires developers involved. It is not a simply managed package to be downloaded and updated, it requires post-upgrade development to return it to users for testing.
The Contract management module is not very robust. It is essentially a separate object that just houses the physical document and you can put "Send Email" buttons and apply an approval process to it, however it is not a contract management tool in the sense of managing document versioning and redlining. Negotiations just occur in word like they normally do.
Misleading Template builder "included." To get templates, and contracts you need to buy the add-in to those modules which you've already purchased called "X-Author." The plug-in allows you to edit templates and manage some redlines, but it's cost prohibitive as it costs as much as a user license to the product itself.
Expensive. When we compared a license of this product vs the license to salesforce itself, Apttus, with standard modules, costs double the price of a normal Salesforce seat license.,1,It cost the company almost $1million in 3 years of licensing. It then cost us the business to implement it in 2.5 years over $5 million dollars internally with resourcing involved to roll out globally. There was no ROI, that was just to implement it as the business continues to not adopt the product.
The adoption level of the product is ~25% of the business actually using the product.
Business areas ended up hiring and spending something near $150k/year in human resources to use the system for the sales team because of the low adoption.,Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick) and Oracle CPQ Cloud (BigMachines)Verified UserApttus CPQ works great for us.2018-08-19T20:36:32.698ZWe use Apttus CPQ across our sales organization the create quotes. Prior to using Apttus, we had multiple ways of quoting including using an Excel worksheet. Today we all use the same tool and across sales and accounting to go from quote to cash. This includes using it to create assets and bill auto-renewals. This has automated several processes that used to be independent systems that often did not match.,Very good at complex pricing and situations. Pricing can be related (% of another value), based on an attribute, Tiered, or done with formulas. It also has the ability to bundle and use options.
Two great tools in the Apttus toolbox are X-Author and Intelligent workflows for approvals
Flexibility for multiple use cases for pricing,Speed was initially an issue but they have made great improvements in this area
Better documentation for administrators,9,We definitely are able to more smoothly generate a professional quote and get it out the door. This is a big plus.
We have had push back from staff that used the worksheet because they don't like the rules that keep them from quoting things they shouldn't quote.,QuoteWerks,Salesforce Community Cloud, NetSuite, NetSuite OpenAir PSAVerified UserApttus CPQ - When you need Complex Rules Modeled Easily2017-12-19T13:25:43.679ZThe Apttus Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tool is being used by our Wolters Kluwer Legal &amp; Regulatory sales organization. This includes a variety of different sales teams with different sales processes and pricing models. The spectrum ranges from SaaS implementations with 12-18 month sales cycles, negotiation of annual renewals of existing contracts for access to online content (3-6 months prior to renewal date), to transactional book sales occurring same day.
The CPQ tool helps sales reps to:
Assemble the appropriate product variations and combinations for qualifying opportunitiesConduct needs assessment exercisesIdentify the appropriate product combinations for customersEnsure that they arrive at suitable price for specific product mixes or bundlesEnsure that the details concerning initial estimates and final quotes are represented accuratelyThe CPQ tool also:
Substantially reduced cycle times to create complex quotes, proposals and ordersReduced quoting errors and rework caused by errorsEnsured discounts and pricing are accurate based on standard pricing rulesEnsured discounts and pricing were approved, prior to providing the quote to the customerIn conjunction with our adoption of eSignature, reduced returns due to speculative ordering,Apttus CPQ handles complex pricing rules with ease. We have tiered pricing, user based pricing, and quantity pricing discounts. Apttus CPQ allows us to easily provide correct pricing based on attributes of the sales rep, the customer and the product.
Apttus CPQ administration is easy compared to similar products. As a product available on the Force.com platform, we were able to cross train our Salesforce administrators and take on the additional administrative overhead without significantly increasing our sales operations team size.
Apttus CPQ is flexible. We are able to rapidly test and deploy new pricing models and offers using the Apttus model.,Apttus has not completely transitioned from a product suite to a product platform vendor. Upgrades of certain products can have interoperability issues with other products in the Apttus stack. Our pain point here was attempting to use Apttus Xauthor for Excel to get around product line limitations in the Apttus CPQ shopping cart. The ultimate resolution was for us to upgrade and leverage the latest version of CPQ, where pricing callback limitations were addressed by client side processing, rather than the hybrid Xauthor process we tried to use.
Upgrades in general require significant testing to ensure no unanticipated issues occur. We have a complete Salesforce sandbox dedicated to providing an environment for testing any modifications or upgrades.
Apttus support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. Given the CPQ system is complex, the level of skilled support available through basic support require you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue.,10,We purchased Apttus CPQ as an infrastructure requirement. As such we did not calculate an ROI value.
Positive impact 1: Improved quote accuracy and quote approval process, thus reducing sales rep time to finalize a quote.
Positive impact 2: Improved compliance with required disclosures of appropriate terms for subscriptions from 50% to 98%, thus reducing rework to change contract terms.
Positive impact 3: Requiring eSignature for every quote resulted in an unanticipated reduction in speculative ordering. The reduction in overall orders was offset by a reduction in returns - resulting in a net increase of 2% to recognized revenue.
Positive impact 4: Shifted ratio of auto renewing subscriptions from 40/60 (auto renew vs annual invitation to subscribe) to 60/40.,,Salesforce Analytics Cloud, Conga ActionGrid, Informatica Cloud Data Integration, Salesforce App Cloud,165,4,Complex product pricing rules - dependent on attributes of the user (sales rep), customer, sale type, and product. Apttus provides the ability to have multiple pricing rules separated by different price lists, and assign those price lists based on attributes of the user, customer and sale type.
Ability to adjust line level pricing or section pricing based on differing rules: surcharge or discount amount or percentage, application of promotion code.
Strong native integration to eSignature solutions such as DocuSign or Adobe.
Ability to manage basic quote terms & conditions using Xauthor for Word: we have 21 separate types of standard terms, depending on the market segment (academic, federal government, corporate, etcetera), and type of sale (various flavors of subscription, standing order, one off sale, service sale, etcetera). These are all managed through a single template which auto generates the correct terms based on system information.,We are leveraging Apptus Machine Intelligence and Apttus CPQ to provide product family sale recommendations to our sales representatives. The Salesforce Account page has a button which appears when recommendations are available for a specific sales rep. This references the Asset Lines of the Apttus CPQ, and selection of products results in automatic creation of an Opportunity and Quote (with appropriate pricing) in the CPQ solution.,We are extending Apttus CPQ and Apttus Machine Intelligence to integrate with Salesforce Analytics to produce a whitespace analysis tool which allows the reps to create target Opportunities as part of overall account and territory planning.
We are utilizing Apttus Max for intelligent Agent/process automation. We intend to integrate Max within Apttus CPQ to streamline the quote creation and order creation process.,10Jack BorlandQuite good2017-12-05T19:40:54.454ZApttus's CPQ is a simple yet powerful quoting solution tool for sales. Most of the times, finding a solution that is easy to use for sales reps and sales managers means spending a lot of time reviewing processes, training and such. Apptus's CPQ is quite straightforward and once it's set up it provides sales reps a kind-of streamlined process to get customer-ready quotes (even executable ones) in a matter of minutes. The fact that we were able to use within our Salesforce.com platform only made the experience leaner and better for both the reps and myself.
Some things that could definitely be better are:
Speed. At some points (especially quarter end) when a huge number of reps were using the tool, we would suffer a heavy lag that would time-out operations most of the times.Mobile app. If there's one, we never used it. Not sure if it's our own company policy in regards to apps, or if there's none actually. If there's none, it would be good to have one.,Easy to use for reps. Not a lot of training needed.
Produces quotes / executables quotes in a matter of minutes.
Catalog / Inventory is pretty straightforward,Mobile app, if there's any.
Better response in high-peak circumstances (like quarter end). This could have been a salesforce.com issue, but honestly, everything else worked just fine.
Reporting. It would be great to be able to see how many of my reps requested discounts and compare that to the standard quotes they can build.,8,It's helped reps be more efficient and respond faster to customer requests
It's definitely helped sales ops and support.Alejandro A. Cabral

We recently signed a contract with Apttus to leverage their Contract Lifecycle Management application to better automate the way we generate, approve, deliver and track our contracts within our Salesforce.com environment. The Apttus team got to know our business and understand our challenges and became a trusted partner to our business. Their solution will help us eliminate many of the manual steps required to process our contracts; reduce the number of manual quality checks; enable us to better search and track contracts by specific terms and ultimately increase the speed at which we are able to push our contracts through our process.

Apttus was brought in to use globally for all of Sales in generating quotes and contracts (the two are different in this case) to be sent and signed by customers. It is being used across Sales globally. The business problem it was supposed to address is to help our sales teams produce quotes faster, in the correct format, and be able to send them on the fly through Apttus/Salesforce to the customer to be reviewed.

The configuration of this product in terms of setting it up for users, requires a developer. The sales process tells you that it is built on the Force.com platform and an admin can configure it, however, this is not true. It required Visual Force and APEX configuration to make it work for the users.

Upgrading to the next version of the product also requires developers involved. It is not a simply managed package to be downloaded and updated, it requires post-upgrade development to return it to users for testing.

The Contract management module is not very robust. It is essentially a separate object that just houses the physical document and you can put "Send Email" buttons and apply an approval process to it, however it is not a contract management tool in the sense of managing document versioning and redlining. Negotiations just occur in word like they normally do.

Misleading Template builder "included." To get templates, and contracts you need to buy the add-in to those modules which you've already purchased called "X-Author." The plug-in allows you to edit templates and manage some redlines, but it's cost prohibitive as it costs as much as a user license to the product itself.

Expensive. When we compared a license of this product vs the license to Salesforce itself, Apttus, with standard modules, costs double the price of a normal Salesforce seat license.

I would not recommend this product to anyone. This product is hard to manage, requires development in house which becomes expensive. The tool itself is extremely expensive for the features it delivers. And ultimately, the sales "bait and Switch" will occur on you, which will require you to buy more licenses or add-ins that were not planned on to get the desired feature set.

We use Apttus CPQ across our sales organization the create quotes. Prior to using Apttus, we had multiple ways of quoting including using an Excel worksheet. Today we all use the same tool and across sales and accounting to go from quote to cash. This includes using it to create assets and bill auto-renewals. This has automated several processes that used to be independent systems that often did not match.

Great for situations were you need to have multiple ways of pricing one product. For example: you need to be able to price a software product for Licensing or for SaaS. Also great where you need to be able to build out a solution with multiple options.

The Apttus Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tool is being used by our Wolters Kluwer Legal & Regulatory sales organization. This includes a variety of different sales teams with different sales processes and pricing models. The spectrum ranges from SaaS implementations with 12-18 month sales cycles, negotiation of annual renewals of existing contracts for access to online content (3-6 months prior to renewal date), to transactional book sales occurring same day.

The CPQ tool helps sales reps to:

Assemble the appropriate product variations and combinations for qualifying opportunities

Conduct needs assessment exercises

Identify the appropriate product combinations for customers

Ensure that they arrive at suitable price for specific product mixes or bundles

Ensure that the details concerning initial estimates and final quotes are represented accurately

Apttus CPQ handles complex pricing rules with ease. We have tiered pricing, user based pricing, and quantity pricing discounts. Apttus CPQ allows us to easily provide correct pricing based on attributes of the sales rep, the customer and the product.

Apttus CPQ administration is easy compared to similar products. As a product available on the Force.com platform, we were able to cross train our Salesforce administrators and take on the additional administrative overhead without significantly increasing our sales operations team size.

Apttus CPQ is flexible. We are able to rapidly test and deploy new pricing models and offers using the Apttus model.

Apttus has not completely transitioned from a product suite to a product platform vendor. Upgrades of certain products can have interoperability issues with other products in the Apttus stack. Our pain point here was attempting to use Apttus Xauthor for Excel to get around product line limitations in the Apttus CPQ shopping cart. The ultimate resolution was for us to upgrade and leverage the latest version of CPQ, where pricing callback limitations were addressed by client side processing, rather than the hybrid Xauthor process we tried to use.

Upgrades in general require significant testing to ensure no unanticipated issues occur. We have a complete Salesforce sandbox dedicated to providing an environment for testing any modifications or upgrades.

Apttus support model almost requires you to purchase premium support. Given the CPQ system is complex, the level of skilled support available through basic support require you to escalate several times before getting to a resource that can address your issue.

Apttus's CPQ is a simple yet powerful quoting solution tool for sales. Most of the times, finding a solution that is easy to use for sales reps and sales managers means spending a lot of time reviewing processes, training and such. Apptus's CPQ is quite straightforward and once it's set up it provides sales reps a kind-of streamlined process to get customer-ready quotes (even executable ones) in a matter of minutes. The fact that we were able to use within our Salesforce.com platform only made the experience leaner and better for both the reps and myself.

Some things that could definitely be better are:

Speed. At some points (especially quarter end) when a huge number of reps were using the tool, we would suffer a heavy lag that would time-out operations most of the times.

Mobile app. If there's one, we never used it. Not sure if it's our own company policy in regards to apps, or if there's none actually. If there's none, it would be good to have one.

Transactional environments would benefit from the deep CPQ offerings Apttus provides. Smaller shops that have a much longer sales cycle may see Apttus as cost prohibitive. Implementation was a chore. We had to hire a full-time person to manage the package. That was an unexpected cost that we were not prepared for.

Apttus CPQ is being used by our customer and engineering organization to configure custom products. The CPQ accelerates the time to generate the bill of material. It is an engineering process that used to take days or even weeks, but with CPQ, it takes only minutes.

Ability to manage large quantities of validation rules necessary for complex product builds.

No product addresses a company's requirement right out of the box, but Apttus CPQ is built on the Salesforce.com platform which is a distinct advantage for us. It allows us to build functional extensions, and customize the application to our specific usage.

Service and support is the key for any product, and Apttus has always made efforts to support their products with continual improvements.

The GUI design of Apttus is configurable but prescriptive. If you want a very specific look and feel, it will take some effort to do so. There have been some modern design updates recently using AngularJS. Check it out to see if it works for you.

We use the Apttus CPQ primarily to configure complex engineered products. We are able to manage numerous technologies and install new technologies quickly. This is a key advantage as new products do not require an additional software build, but a simple data load of the validation rules. This tool has transformed our customer engagement process, and it allows us to enable customers to enter their requirements for us to review. This is much better than interviewing customers and entering data on behalf of the customers.

EverString is a SaaS platform that helps B2B organizations identify and engage with their ideal customers by providing Predictive Demand Generation, Insights, Scoring and Segmentation. We have some typical SaaS characteristics—subscription sales model, a small number of products at first glance but a tiered structure, meaning selling is a lot more complicated than it seems, and a business that is growing and evolving fast. We had common problems in our quoting process - a disconnect between our CRM data and what was put in front of our customers. [They were] simple errors that should never happen. Additionally, as we grew we needed to relieve the burden to Finance and Legal.

We went with Apttus for two simple reasons: they were fantastic to work with and they could solve our problems. The sales process was incredibly smooth—just a great team overall. The CPQ does exactly what we wanted by creating consistency in our sales process, something we needed to scale. CPQ forces you to look critically at your sales process, but their team of experts helped us achieve that in a thoughtful way. You don’t want to just automate what you already do… you have to think about doing it better, the Apttus team really helped us with that. Great experience overall, would definitely recommend them.

For any organization that runs standard or non-standard sales cycles Apttus is a great fit. If you're an organization that requires heavy involvement for approvals from finance, legal or executives, having Apttus CPQ streamlines your process and ensures that you are able to deliver both accurate and timely quotes as well contracts. Additionally, partnering with Apttus will help you identify and shore up gaps in your current process.

EverString is a predictive marketing platform and we’ve been growing fast in the last few years. Sales, sales team, and our solution suite have all grown rapidly. We needed repeatability and consistency in our sales process—like any business growing rapidly and needing to scale. We wanted to get a CPQ in early in our growth to solve for these problems and help us scale easier. We choose Apttus because they could give us exactly what we needed and have been great partners to our business.

The system has been easy to use and the sales team adopted it quickly. We wanted to think through as many scenarios as possible in terms of what our future state and needs might be. Apttus helped us through this process—that’s critical. Apttus has been a partner, not a vendor, which is what you need for CPQ. Our goal was to future proof our organization, and we can see the success there in our growth.

It is an enterprise level tool which allows us to sell products with attributes and bundle products.

We are also using Advanced Approvals by Apttus which allow us to configure complex approvals which seamlessly integrate with the CPQ tool. Email approvals are especially important for our organization which allow managers to approve the quotes on the go.

It is enterprise level tool in the market. If your company is large and deals are complex then Apttus is the right tool to use. If the products that you sell are not too complex you can probably use salesforce's native functionality. AWS approvals allow you to configure really complex approvals with different levels and multiple price rules. If your organization has really simple approval processes then you are better off using salesforce's native approvals.

Before Apttus, we used a manual process to configure products and calculate pricing while providing quotes to customers. This process was not consistent, it was very cumbersome, complex, high-maintenance, and error prone. We also did not have the ability to systematically track the progression of the quote through negotiations with the customer and analyze the impact of negotiations on the final outcome.

With Apttus CPQ, we were able streamline and optimize the product configuration, pricing and proposal creation and management process. We also seamlessly integrated this with our existing sales and contract generation processes. Our sales team now has the ability to configure product offers in a consistent manner with improved efficiency, and are able to track and improve related sales metrics.

Our North American and UK based sales teams use Apttus for all quotes (new business, add-on sales, renewals). We use it to manage pricing, quoting, and assets. We use X-Author for Word for our quote/order form. We have about 30,000 active price points, 400K active assets, and a few hundred inclusion rules.

Administrator usability: Very easy to create problems with price list items firing unintentionally which leads to price list item sprawl. No holistic testing tools to make sure you've set up pricing / rules the way you intended.

X-Author has limited capabilities to include related objects - our Quote header object has several hundred fields that serve no purpose but to make form generation more stable / faster.

In a complex environment where the IT team has plenty of SFDC expertise, Apttus is a great fit - especially if you sell the same product in multiple offerings / packages. In a simpler environment, it may not be worth the overhead.

This tool has proven over and over again that it was more than worth the investment. My sales team's pipelines are up to date (I think for the first time since we got Salesforce) and I've been able to use the tool for several nasty projects (like updating country name formats, etc) that used to take days - and now take less than an hour. My favorite part is the Quick App feature - which I utilize all of the time to complete one-off tasks that come to light. Right now, our sales and finance teams are the primary users, but we have hopes to move project management on board soon!

We are just beginning to use X-Author and already the time saving is tremendous. We have only built a few of our own apps so far and needed help with a more complex one. If you do not have a lot of customizations then writing apps is a breeze; custom objects can make it a bit more challenging. We are looking forward to using this tool across all users.

We are currently using X-Author for Excel with Salesforce to update and populate formula fields in Excel and then have X-Author attach the document to the opportunity record. It has made our interaction with Excel easy and effortless. The setup was less than 20 minutes and worked well with our complicated Excel spreadsheet. Thanks Apttus for making our lives easier and less complicated.

Apttus continues to stay in contact to ensure I'm happy with their product. I have also signed up with the XAuthor group on their site which always provides additional use cases on how other companies are using XAuthor. I enjoy working with Apttus as well as using their product.

My company uses X-Author throughout various departments. It is an excellent tool because it allows users to operate in Excel, an environment with which they are more familiar. Allowing the users to work in Excel while simultaneously updating records in Salesforce is a critical aspect of generating accurate data in reports.

As an engineer, I spend a majority of my day working in Excel managing lists, performing calculations, etc. I had limited knowledge of administrative tasks in maintaining the Salesforce org when my company first got this app, but was able to easily learn how to integrate my design spreadsheets with Salesforce and created complex X-Author apps. This application has greatly propelled our engineering / technical sales departments to the next level of efficiency!

Apttus has excellent support of their product. They are quick to respond to any issues we are having. Apttus is also extremely accommodating of incorporating new ideas or fixes to future releases of the product.

Apttus X-Author for Excel is perfect for companies who use Salesforce to develop pricing and proposals, but use Excel to fine tune the technical design aspects of a sale. With a little bit of work and some creative thinking, linking the technical designs to the proposal generation can be a powerful resource for growing companies.

We have deployed Apttus to 550+ field sellers and managers as part of very prescriptive guided selling solution. Our core solution is a Java-based tablet application that leverages Apttus via web app windows for browser based access. We support several products with thousands of pricebooks. Our quote model is more complex than a typical organization in that we have over 30 quote header level attributes that will [have] impact over deal profitability as much as the line item pricing and levers. Our line quantity calculations required additional attributes to support a rental model that uses different computations based on product type. We leveraged the Salesforce.com Process Builder and Approval Workflow for our approval process and used DocuSign for contract execution which includes internal contract counter signatures. This requirement drove us to also leverage the Apttus DocuSign API Integration solution.

Apttus is widely used in our org across all sales divisions. Below are the features it provides and problems it addresses:Allowing our sales reps a way to create accurate proposals for our customers per the pricing structure we have put in place. The ability to quote accurately in multiple currencies. The ability to create sales promotions and discounts seamlessly. Implementing approval processes for managerial sign-off on discounts.

Although a lot of things can be customized, the main "shopping cart" feature that the sales reps interact with is not as easily customized. We did try making our own feature via visualforce, however this provides complications when it comes time to upgrade.

The X-Author tool for editing documents is also a little lacking; it requires us to create additional fields in SF when trying to edit display elements like number of decimal places and date format.

There also appeared to be a fair amount of staff turnover at Apttus, as our staff changed a number of times during some of our projects

Apttus CPQ is a thoroughly complex tool which would likely only be implemented for businesses at the enterprise level that have a significant amount of complexity in their products and sales processes. A key consideration is whether you need a CPQ tool native to Salesforce or not.

Apttus is used in one of our Salesforce instances for contract management. We chose to utilize Apttus for a variety of reasons, including version management, approval processing, electronic signature, and document retention. Apttus helped us move to a more streamlined, controlled process for not only creating and maintaining contracts, but also for activities such as negotiating terms. We have since expanded our functionality to include automation that enables us to move information through the system and into other systems using APIs.

Apttus is a robust tool that provides users with the ability to configure it to meet their unique needs. The solution can be leveraged to not only pull information out of Salesforce to populate the template, but you can enable the recipient to add information and have that automatically populate back into Salesforce upon eSignature as well.

We use the Apttus tool called X-Author. It is an amazing tool that allows my users to pull data from our Salesforce.com org into an Excel based template. From that point, simply using the standard features in Excel, we can manipulate the data and push it back into the cloud. This was originally brought into our company to help with a complex spreadsheet used to build a scope of supply for complex waste water processes. That implementation went so well that we found ways that X-Author could reduce data entry time for nearly every department in the company. X-Author and the Apttus team have provided me with a solution to nearly any business process hurdle I run across.

X-Author gives you a solution any time it becomes clear that you can't do that in Salesforce. We use the tool for sales, inventory control, accounting and GL management, project management and production management. The departments that are not currently using X-Author are only that way because I have yet to find time to get them involved.

We have been using Apttus since 2011 and have not looked back! Before Apttus, we had very old systems and processes in place. With Apttus we have gone completely paper free - no more filing cabinets! We have cut our contract cycle process in half and increased speed and volume of productivity. My favorite part is our reports and metrics. Before Apttus, we had no idea what kind of volumes we were handling, what kind of trends we could see, and important information that we now capture that gives our executive team insight from the contracting world. I can't say enough about all the great changes that have come out of using Apttus with Salesforce.com and EchoSign-- amazing! Because we have been so successful with this product, we have moved other departments on Salesforce.com and integrated their information with ours. The only issue I have had is with technical support. I find them hard to understand because English is their second language, and they speak very technical, so as a non-tech user, I'm not always sure what I am supposed to do to fix the problem. I also find them very slow to respond unless I escalate it each time.

World Water Works is leveraging Apttus to to drive efficiency, quality and enhance our customer experience. The technology has been super helpful since we implemented it less than a year ago. We are seeing certain functions which took days be reduced to less than 30 minutes. We are excited to implement in many areas of our business from finance, engineering, sales, ERP, manufacturing, and beyond. Many thanks Apttus. Great discussions with you at Dreamforce this week!

Apttus is being used to generate customer proposals for our direct customers in North America. We anticipate having Apttus CPQ rolled out to EMEA and APAC by the end of 2016. The solution is fully integrated with our SFDC sales processes. Our customer proposals include the customization of our product, pricing that may be freely negotiated or based on a contract, up to 4 levels of approval and the presentation of the quote to the end customer.

As a SAAS solution with a large amount of R&D being invested, there is functionality that is becoming standard in the platform that previously would have required some customer customization. The incorporation of the standard functionality will require regression testing and migration off of custom code. In the long term this is a positive, but in the short term does create some overhead with testing.

Apttus is well suited to provide an SFDC integrated CPQ experience. It can handle complex configurations and multiple languages. As a company that was transitioning off of a legacy CPQ solution, the adoption by our users was seamless with training lasting less than 4 hours. The user experience between SFDC and Apttus is so smooth that I would have a hard time imagining using Apttus independent of SFDC. That being said, I have heard they are developing an integrated experience with other CRM/ERP platforms. You will be best served if you are integrating with a platform that Apttus supports.